Posts by Minimaul

Amazon has more than half of all Arm server CPUs in the world

Re: Windows

The whole industry’s having a slowdown after the burst of sales when work from home setups had to be made for COVID, so I don’t think this is a comparison that can be easily drawn, yet…

Re: Wasteful?

Probably less than you might think - older instance types are available for a long time after they are no longer current generation instances - eg t2 is still about and that's an instance type from 2014.

I can still start up A1 instances too - they were the very first generation of ARM instances back in 2018.

Vote to turf out remainder of Nominet board looks inevitable after .uk registry ignores reform demands

Mythic Beasts are a great choice for a UK registrar that gives a shit and provides great support.

Look what the Softcat dragged in: Revenues grow 21% as UK reseller refuses to blink at Brexit

We use Softcat, and my biggest complaint is that they never ever stop ringing us, and they don't take no for an answer, and they're always trying to flog some stupid services scheme that we're not interested in and have told them before we don't want.

It's gotten to the point that when we see a Softcat call we just pick up and put the phone straight back down now.

The new Huawei is the world's fastest phone

Not actually the fastest phone

Winning a handful of android specific benchmarks and a memory test does not a fastest phone make.

Apple's A9 SoC still has a commanding lead in actual performance.

Got a pricey gaming desktop from PC World for Xmas? Check the graphics specs

This article is utter bollocks.

The recommended power requirements on NVIDIA's site account for all manner of shitty power supplies. The 600W rating is a "Minimum system power requirement" - you can build a system with a 980Ti and use far less than 600W peak.

A decent 500W power supply is perfectly sensible.

Toyota Yaris Hybrid: Half-pint composite for the urban jungle

IT angle?

Ten things you always wanted to know about IP Voice

Crap article

This article is pretty bloody awful... I can think of so many holes it's not even funny.

"Even in 2015 you seldom see an organisation that uses just IP trunks to call external numbers. ISDN lines are still the primary way to connect to the world, for the simple reason that they work and you can be absolutely sure – unless there is some kind of hideous hardware problem on the network – that the signal will get from end to end intact." - this is crap. A *lot* of businesses use SIP exclusively now. We do.

"Most SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) services rely on people connecting to them over the internet, which means performance can be variable. If you are calling in your own country, however, it is often acceptable unless you are, say, a call centre that really cares about sound quality." - so get a decent provider and a decent internet connection. It just works *fine* then.

"Can I use SIP for cheap international calls?" Yes, you can. Just fine, and with superb quality too.

"Moving to SIP for international calls is for home users with relatives overseas; it is not for businesses." Yes, it really is for businesses, you won't tell the difference vs ISDN, and it can save a fortune. Again, don't go with the absolute cheapest provider, but find a decent one you can trust. There are a lot of these about in the UK.

"If your phones can only do 100Mbps Ethernet and your users whinge that this isn't fast enough, tell them to get lost. Generally it is fine unless they are doing stuff like throwing high-res graphics and video around." When was the last time you worked on an actual network? Even Sage wants gig-e to perform sensibly on accounts of any size. Loading decent sized office documents and PDFs is an issue on 100mbit even!

Apple's ONE LESS THING: the iPod Classic disappears

Lots of places are still selling the iPod classics. I got one today to use in my car for sound and only paid £99 - after flogging the old iPhone 4 that does that now I should just about break even!

When will Microsoft next run out of US IPv4 addresses for Azure?

Re: Perhaps they want to access The Register?

Seems a little hypocritical of El Reg to be complaining about people relying on v4 when they still are too :)

IPv6 isn't hard people, get your head out of your arse and get it done!

Re: Confused about IPv6 vs. NAT.

If your ISP doesn't allocate you a public IPv6 range, they are doing it wrong and you should change.

Firewalling v6 is not hard - just drop all new incoming connections and use a stateful firewall to allow replies to outgoing connections on your router - you are now as secure as NAT ever made you.

The addition of privacy addressing means that a remote site can't realistically pin down your IP to a single machine as they regularly change too.

Just make sure you allow ICMPv6 - otherwise nothing will work quite right. Not that there's a good case for blocking ICMP on v4 or v6 anyway.

Password hints easily snaffled from Windows PCs

Re: Doh!

Damn.

I guess this is more of a problem than I thought! ;)

Re: Doh!

"In first looking at the storage location here, I was a little disappointed thinking that the hint was encrypted in some way until I noticed the pattern of zeros. Having dealt with a fair amount of PHP malware in the last couple months, one of things the “baddies” do is chunk up their payload data into individual characters and then encode them in their ASCII numerical representation."

I think this explains it all, really.

Also, my password hint is "a". Guess my password from that. :)